The gladiators who were trained to tight in the Coliseum were compelled
to practice the most graceful postures of falling and the finest
attitudes to assume in dying, in case they were vanquished. They were
obliged to eat food which would make the blood thick in order that they
should not die quickly when wounded, thus giving the spectators
prolonged gratification by the spectacle of their agonies. Each had to
take this oath: "We swear that we will suffer ourselves to be bound,
scourged, burned, or killed by the sword, or whatever Eumolpus ordains,
and thus, like freeborn gladiators, we religiously devote both our
souls and our bodies to our master." They were trained to exercise
sublime self-control even when dying a cruel death.

The American Minister at St. Petersburg was summoned one morning to
save a young, dissolute, reckless American youth, Poe, from the
penalties incurred in a drunken debauch. By the Minister's aid young
Poe returned to the United States. Not long after this the author of
the best story and poem competed for in the "Baltimore Visitor" was
sent for, and behold, the youth who had taken both prizes was that same
dissolute, reckless, penniless, orphan youth, who had been arrested in
St. Petersburg,--pale, ragged, with no stockings, and with his
threadbare but well brushed coat buttoned to the chin to conceal the
lack of a shirt. Young Poe took fresh courage and resolution, and for
a while showed that he was superior to the appetite which was striving
to drag him down. But, alas, that fatal bottle! his mind was stored
with riches, yet he died in moral poverty. This was a soldier's
epitaph:--

"Here lies a soldier whom all must applaud,
Who fought many battles at home and abroad!
But the hottest engagement he ever was in,
Was the conquest of self, in the battle of sin."

In 1860, when a committee visited Abraham Lincoln at his home in
Springfield, Ill., to notify him of his nomination as President, he
ordered a pitcher of water and glasses, "that they might drink each
other's health in the best beverage God ever gave to man." "Let us,"
he continued, "make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the
temperance pledge as for husbands to wear their wives' bonnets in
church, and instances will be as rare in one case as the other."

Burns exercised no control over his appetites, but gave them the rein:--

"Thus thoughtless follies laid him low
And stained his name."